Paper Fan Butterflies
by nathan-p
Summary: Just like anyone else, Jonathan Crane had to attend high school. This is his best friend's story. Nolanverse, OC, and gratuitous fluff.
1. Man On Horse

AN: I asked myself the question last night: what would Scarecrow have been like in high school? This was probably a terrible idea, but what the hell, I went ahead and wrote it.

Ran this one by Saphira112 and Doometh before posting. Thanks to them, as always, and to four others who know who they are for asking me to post it.

I do not own Batman.

Warnings for "the usual": heavy language, explicit sex.

* * *

I looked up at the man on the horse, quivering with fear -- and suddenly, I recognized him. Sure, he was wearing a doofy burlap mask, but how could I forget the kid I'd bonded with over Duran Duran and Oingo Boingo?

"You asshole!" I shouted, and belatedly realized I was more than a little high off whatever was in the steam boiling up from the burst pipes.

He glared down at me, and even through the stupid mask I recognized the Crane Death Stare.

"Where've you been?" I shouted, and then he gassed me.


	2. Free Drinks

We didn't talk much at the start. If at all. We'd met in freshman year in our homeroom class, and somehow, a friendship had sprung up between us.

I was a smart kid, but I didn't have much of a work ethic; I was in the Honors classes, which I was definitely intelligent enough to be in, but I was easily bored and distracted. So I didn't do the work, and scraped by with C and B grades, which aren't bad from a normal perspective.

Jonathan wasn't much smarter than me, but he had a hell of a work ethic. And he was charming.

That's one thing you should understand about us; I was perfect sidekick material. Witty and loyal. He was definite main-man material: confident and charming. And neither of us was the least bit interested in dating, him because he _lived_ for His Work, me because I was a loyal sidekick.

So we made the perfect pair, namely because I could get free things for telling stories about us, even while we were still in high school. And in college. And when he was teaching at GU. And now it's pity drinks, for the most part.

But I digress. Any story, though, involving me and him usually went off hilariously, and because the both of us had a penchant for wit, it was often funny as well. If in a somewhat grim way.

Another thing about us. I had a rather happy home life. Nothing spectacular, but decent. Apparently, this was not the case at the Crane residence. I never found out exactly what life was like at his house, but I surmise that either some truly disturbing things had happened and were happening there, or his vendetta with the goons (who I later came to know well) went back much further than I thought it did.

He never talked about his home life very much, and the same went for His Work, for the reason, mainly, that it was very easy to tell when things were and were not going well. If they were going well, he was happy. If not, he was depressed.

And it so happens that my next free-drinks story involves him, His Work, and blood. A great deal of blood, actually, and some of it was ours.


	3. Dead Guy

He called me up on a Monday night, which was more than a little surprising. He was the sort who didn't deign to call ordinary mortals; ordinary mortals had to call _him_.

Having been in his inner circle (of one) for a solid two years by then, I realized that this could not be good news.

"Hello, Caroline," he said smoothly.

"Yeah?" I said, pinning the phone to my shoulder with the side of my head as I opened my Chemistry book. Unlike my super-genius friend, I was right on track as far as classes went.

"I need your help with something."

"Really?" I snapped. "The invincible Jonny Crane asking _me_ for help?"

"It won't take you very long," he said. "I just need you to help me do some cleanup."

"What kind of cleanup?" I asked, suspicious. I shoved my textbook away from me and pressed the phone closer to my ear, as if that would make him talk faster.

"Some... uh... well, I can't really explain it right now," he said. It was the first and only time I'd ever heard him sound unsettled.

"What did you do?" I asked. I was more than used to his shenanigans by then.

"I, er... I need your help disposing of a body."

"A _body_?" I said. "You're kidding." Skinny, dorky Jonathan Crane, kill a guy? No way. "Surely, you must be kidding."

"I'm not kidding," he said. "And don't call me Shirley," he added after a pause.

"Ah, I knew I could make you laugh," I said. "Be right over."

Of course, I didn't have a car at the time. But super-genius that he was, he'd somehow arranged it so that he was living on his own in an apartment near GU, where he was actually attending classes. I had no idea if he ever slept.

And GU was right near my house, and I had a driver's license. So I took the family car (which was mine, though it allegedly belonged to my younger sister) and drove over.

He opened the door after I banged on it twice, and I just stared at him.

"Jesus Christ," I said.

"Just come in," he said.

I did.

"You're fucking _covered_ in blood, did you notice?"

"Yeah, I noticed," he said, dropping the charming façade that had many of the girls at school secretly lusting after him. Except they couldn't tell if he was faculty or a student, so no one openly lusted after him. And then the ones who would have anyway were discouraged by the fact that I was always with him. Protection. Like a five foot three skinny girl was going to afford much protection.

"What do you need me for?" I asked, even though it was becoming obvious.

He led me into his "lab", which was really just the apartment proper. There was a cot in the corner and it looked like he'd been cooking ramen over a Bunsen burner.

I didn't ask what he was up to -- with Jonathan, you never did, because more likely than not he'd go off on a rant about His Work and you'd be stuck there for _hours_ on end. I just took a look around.

The problem became immediately obvious. There was a body on the floor. And blood had sprayed everywhere.

"Unexpected, uh, results," Jonathan said from his position near my elbow.

"I don't need to hear about it," I said. "If you don't tell me anything, I can't tell the court anything."

"Right," he said. "Of course."

"And you didn't get any of the blood on you, did you?"

"Only on my skin," he said, obviously understanding that I was getting at if he'd gotten any of it on his clothing. Blood is a _bitch_ to wash out of clothes.

"Obviously," I said. "How thick do you think I am? Go wash up."

He did, somehow finding it necessary to take off his shirt in the process. Where most of the girls would have been salivating over this, I didn't care. I had a corpse and many large blood splatters to deal with.

"Fuck," I muttered. "I had no idea people had this much _blood_ in them."

"Neither did I," he admitted from where he was standing by the sink -- or, more accurately, from where he was sitting on the counter by the sink.

"Any of it yours?" I asked, squatting down on my heels next to the stiff.

"A little," he said. "But I've already sterilized it and bandaged it."

Which, in Jonathan-speak, meant that he had just about cut his goddamn arm off somehow, but since he had managed to make it stop bleeding, everything was fine. Sometimes I really hated him. Or at least I hated his habits.

"What am I contracting if I clean this up?"

"Nothing," he said. "He had nothing bloodborne, I'd already checked that out."

Remember I mentioned never asking what he was doing? That was practically rule number one of being buds with Jonathan. Never ask what he's doing.

"Well, good," I said. "Where do you keep the gloves again?"

"One cabinet up," he said, and promptly started dozing against the wall. I envied his ability to sleep on command, but I didn't envy his choice of sleeping position -- he'd be in a world of hurt once he woke up.

I grabbed two pairs out of the jumbo-size box (which made me wonder a little about what the hell he was doing), snapped them on, and donned a pair of his spare goggles.

Then I set to work, equipped with a fucking ton of paper towels and a firm sense of what I didn't know not hurting me.

First I had to move the stiff. I shoved him out of the way. Big guy. No wonder Jonathan'd gotten injured. I glanced in his direction -- yep, just as I'd expected, there was duct tape on his forearm. (I didn't doubt there was gauze under it. He said duct tape stuck better. He didn't have much body hair.)

He was kind of cute when he was asleep. When he was awake, I never had the time to notice his looks -- I was too busy composing a verbal comeback. But now that he was asleep, I had the perfect opportunity to stare all I wanted, because I sure as hell didn't want to look at what I was doing.

Wet paper towels in hand, I set to work on the cabinets first, glancing over at Jonathan once in a while.

He had great cheekbones. Well, I wasn't a wonderful judge of them, but he had a fairly striking... bone structure, I guess. Which was probably most of the reason many girls had such big crushes on him -- he was thin, witty, and looked like he was always on the verge of tears. Which he wasn't, ever. I'd never known him to so much as get misty-eyed.

And he had unusually pretty lips. The kind that it's overly easy to make jokes about -- maybe it's Maybelline, maybe he's born with it. (I presumed that either he was born with it or he'd been extremely weird from an early age. Odds were favoring "born with it", because I'd never seen him _without_ those pretty, pretty lips. Even now.)

I swiped at a persistent patch of blood before realizing that it was _dried on_ to the cabinet. And the floor. And the counter. I shuddered. Ew. And I hoped that it hadn't been anything _too_ serious. Much as I occasionally hated him, I didn't want anything bad to happen to him. He was my friend, after all. And he always would be my friend.

Of course, there was still his voice -- if any of his fan girls had ever heard him _speak_, I'd have had to fight them off with sticks. Smooth, calm, charming... man. But I'd known him since he'd had a comically high-pitched voice, and so the Crane Voice had no effect on me -- which was lucky.

I moved on to the blood puddles on the floor, soaking them up with the paper towels and then wiping away the dregs with more wet paper towels. It was calming in an odd way. I checked my watch. Not late by my standards at all. I almost wished it were. Couldn't say for the life of me why, though.

Perhaps I _liked_ cleaning up puddles of blood on linoleum floors. Now _there_ was a band name. Or perhaps it was more of an album. "Linoleum Floors" by Puddles of Blood. Maybe more of a song title. "Puddles of Blood on Linoleum Floors". Definitely had a ring to it.

I scrubbed merrily away until I had the last vestiges of blood off the floor -- mostly. There were quite a few dried-on splotches, some alarmingly large, but what the hell, I could only do so much with paper towels.

I rocked back on my heels and stood up, wincing as my knees popped. Arthritis ran in my family, and I suspected it was in the mood for a running jump-tackle in my direction sometime in the near future. But whatever. I was still young, and so was the night. And that was why they made painkillers, wasn't it?

Predictably, he woke up right before I pitched the box of gloves at his head. I forgot to mention the eyes, didn't I? Well, they were item number four on the list of things that made girls swoon over him -- pale blue.

"Help me move the dead guy," I said. "Where do you want him?"

He got gloves on and hopped down from the counter, then walked over and took the dead guy by the wrists. "Door," he said.

"You have a garden we're gonna bury him in?" I asked, taking the ankles and lifting on silent cue.

We carried him over to the door and dropped him. He felt recently dead. Probably was -- scratch that, this sucker had been alive this morning. Most likely he'd still been alive two hours ago, just before Jonathan dropped me a line.

Like I said, I didn't think about what he was doing, and I didn't ask. If he got arrested, and anyone found out I'd helped him... okay, who the fuck was I kidding? We'd been partners in crime since before he started shaving.

Dragging the dead guy down the stairs was, surprisingly, not all that hard.

Heaving him into the Dumpster?

Much harder.

And he _bled_ on me.

"Ew! Christ!" I said, jumping backwards from the Dumpster and swatting frantically at my arm, which was splattered with blood. "Gross!"

He laughed at me -- well, he smirked, but that was about as close as he got to an actual laugh, ever.

"You're not the one who just got _bled on_ by a dead guy!" I snarled.

"No, I'm not," he said. "But that doesn't make it any less funny."

"Is there anything _else_ you need for me to do?" I asked, glaring at the Dumpster as if it had wronged me, rather than the laws of physics combined with a dead guy.

"Nothing involving blood," he said.

"Oh, _good_," I said.

"But I _do_ need your help with something else," he said, and we traipsed back up the stairs to his apartment, where I scrubbed my arm furiously until the skin turned red.

He waited very patiently until I was done washing to pitch a binder at my head; I ducked, and it crashed into one of the cabinets lining the walls.

"Nice catch," he said, showing the side of his personality that was all normal teenage-boy-sarcasm, rather than Crane Sarcasm.

"Bite me," I replied, and opened the binder. It was some sort of English class, arranged very neatly into five categories: homework completed, homework assigned but not completed, handouts, returned assignments, and loose-leaf paper. Very Jonathan. And later it would be a Very Crane thing, organization.

"Write me an essay," he said.

"Which one of these is it?"

"Yellow sheet dated this morning," he said, and I unclipped it from the binder. In keeping with his habits, it was not only dated by day, month, and year, but by time of day.

"Jesus," I said, skimming it. He could have done it blindfolded and half-asleep. A very simple assignment, all told -- in fact, I had done it that afternoon myself. (Though he might have been a supergenius in some areas, English was not one of them. He couldn't stand it. As a result, he was in my level of English, which had resulted in one of his low periods when he had a breakdown in class after the instructor told him that his interpretation of a selection was flat-out wrong. He didn't do well in normal-level classes.)

"And you haven't done it why?"

"You want the truth, or may I lie to you?"

"Truth, please," I answered. He might be a manipulative dick to other people, but I only found that out later, because he never was to me -- I suppose because I was the only "friend" he had. He could have lied to me, manipulated me, all he wanted to, and I would never have stopped him or even tried to, but he didn't need to, because of the way my head worked. Or the way things inside my head worked, to be a little more precise: because he was my _friend_, and my only friend, I would cheerily have done anything for him. And by that I mean _anything_. Because I knew he would repay me.

"I need a sample of someone else's writing to compare to mine," he said, chewing on the end of a pen as he stared morosely at the floor. (_That_ was one habit he broke before long -- after the first mouthful of ink, he switched to stress balls.) I could practically _see_ his mood sliding downward; evidently, the bleeding dead guy had been important to His Work, and his deadness impaired his usefulness a great deal.

"I already did this, man," I said. "Can't I just send you mine, or give it to you tomorrow?"

"No," he said. "I have to write an essay comparing the two pieces. Tonight."

"All right, all right," I said. "I'll write it."

This was the way a lot of things went with him; eventually, there was nothing left to do but give up.

So I scribbled down my response to the essay prompt, not making as much perfect sense as I had when I'd written it earlier that day, but getting my point across. I thought I'd done pretty well the second time around, especially given that it was so late, even by my standards.

I'd been writing sitting at one of the counters, and when I stood up, I saw that Jonathan had fallen asleep on the counter again. I had no sympathy for him -- after all, he was the one pushing himself to his limits so often that he fell asleep almost at random. And, though I wasn't aware of it at the time, I was the only person anywhere who had a license to surprise the hell out of Jonathan Crane without waking up in Heaven.

So I returned the favor and threw the binder at him.

I didn't mean to hit him, and I didn't -- not really, anyway. And for once, he'd actually been asleep, because he made a surprised noise before reaching for the binder and peering at it.

"How many times do I have to tell you you need glasses?" I asked.

He mumbled something that was probably insulting in my direction and skimmed through my paper.

"All right," I said, turning in my chair to face him. "Quid pro quo. Tell me about yourself."

He glared at me, and _that_ was my first experience with the true Crane Death Stare.

I melted.

"Okay, okay," I said. "Obviously it's too late and I'm getting a bit loopy, let's just pretend this never happened, okay?"

He smiled -- not the smirk I was familiar with, but a _smile_, no lie. (And it wasn't my first clue that this was going to be one hell of a night. The dead guy had been -- well, scratch that. _Jonathan_ calling _me_ had been my first clue.) And combined with the weirdness of getting a smile out of the guy I was most familiar with as always having a smirk on his face, it was a _sad_ smile, and I suddenly understood what people meant when they talked about him always looking like he was on the verge of tears.

I _really_ wanted to give him a hug.

He looked at me, smile fading. "Don't do that," he said. "I hate it when you do that."

He closed his eyes, and added, "That's all. Go home now."

And dammit, I tried.


	4. Girly Moment

You see, me and Jonathan were, like I've said half a million times, friends. And we didn't have any other friends besides each other.

So yes, I got up, and yes, I went out the door, but I didn't make it down the stairs to my car, and I didn't even make it to the stairs. The hell with it, I barely had the door shut behind me before I slumped to the floor.

Damn it, I was _tired_, and I was _confused_, and I couldn't fix one of those until I'd fixed the other. So I hammered on his door until he let me in, which wasn't very long.

He looked like a very tired college student when he opened the door, but that changed to a half-amused, half-disgusted look when I hugged his ankles and started sobbing into the floor.

He had become used to my "girly moments", and, as usual, didn't ask for any sort of explanation, just ordered me to get inside so he could close the damn door.

Once I was inside, he made me sit on a stool and made me hot tea over a Bunsen burner, which I found endearing as always. And I cried into my tea, which ruined the flavor completely, while he listened to me bitch about my life.

"Are you done?" he asked.

I sniffled and wiped my nose on a spare paper towel. "Yeah. I guess."

"I need your help with something else," he began. "More fun than disposing of dead men."

"Well, good," I said. "I don't enjoy getting bled on."

"No one does," he said, staring into the distance. "It makes an awful mess."

And it was thinking of _that_, so many years later, that made me realize that while everyone may be a little mad inside, Jonathan was, and always had been, a little madder than most. But he'd been _very_ good at hiding it. So good that not only did he fool his closest friend, he fooled _himself_.

"Anyway," he said. "Tomorrow is Halloween. Would you care to come trick-or-treating with me?"

I don't really regret not laughing in his face. Not anymore.

I stared, and then reminded myself that the less I knew, the better. "Any specific instructions?"

"Bring some candy," he said softly. "And wear white."

"Why not black?"

"It's horribly unoriginal. By the way, you're a doctor."

"And you are?" I couldn't help but ask.

He grinned. "You'll find out. Be here by five. Tell your parents I'm helping you in Chemistry." He winked. "And we will be, of course."

We sat in silence for a moment, and then he smirked as if something had amused him. Probably me. "Quid pro quo. You help me, I tell you what I'm doing."

He knew me too well. Now I just _had_ to show up.

"See you there," I said.

And this time, I made it home.


	5. Big Fight

I ran a hand through my hair, then knocked on his door.

"Come in," said a muffled voice from the other side. "Door's unlocked."

I stepped in, gripping my bag of candy in a suddenly nervous hand. "Jonathan?" I called. It was almost totally dark, with only a few tea candles making puddles of light on the counter. I closed the door behind me. "Jonathan?" I repeated.

"Right here," he said, appearing from nowhere. He tossed a surgical mask at me -- I caught it by reflex and put it on. Nothing weird about that, it was practically part of my costume -- the weird thing was that he was wearing one, too.

"You've got the candy?" he asked.

I lifted the bag, showing it to him.

"Good. I've got pillowcases."

With that, he absconded with the candy towards the nearest counter, where I saw him pour it carefully into the pillowcases. He returned with one in each hand, and handed one to me. "If you'd just step out..."

I backed out into the hall.

"No peeking," he warned me from inside. "Turn around and face the stairs."

I stared at the stairs -- pardon the pun -- as he came out of the apartment and shut the door. I heard him fiddling with some kind of cloth, and then he told me to turn around.

He'd dressed as a _scarecrow_, of all things, complete with ragged clothes. The finishing touch was a mask, obviously homemade like the rest, sewn painstakingly out of a burlap sack which had, in a former life, contained rice, according to the faded lettering across his jaw. There was thick black thread messily holding the "mouth" shut, and the eyeholes gaped blankly open, backed by his eyes, surrounded by pale skin.

"No questions," he said. "Remember: quid pro quo. Lend me a hand and I'll tell you everything you want to know."

"Can I have one question for my patience?" I asked. "Why a scarecrow?"

"Grade-school nickname," he explained, ushering me down the stairs and outside. "I was thin, gawky, tall. My clothes weren't new."

He looked at my car, crouching beneath the streetlight. "I'll drive."

I tossed him the keys.

As we got in and he began to drive, I felt exhilarated, though I couldn't pinpoint why. It _felt_ kind of like the best caffeine highs do: I was on top of the fucking _world_,

there was nothing I couldn't do, I was fucking _invincible_, and everything was very, very clear.

He drove to a neighborhood somewhere in the suburbs, a place I didn't recognize. He parked in a space between streetlights, and we got out, carrying our pillowcases of candy. "Follow me," he said, and I did, padding through the dark, high on the cold night air.

He stopped outside a park where some kids were having a Halloween bonfire -- I saw them moving silhouetted against the fire, roasting hot dogs over the flames. There were four bags of marshmallows on the picnic table.

He stood for a moment, and then cocked his arm back and threw something straight into the fire; it exploded with a bang and a puff of smoke flew up. He grabbed my hand and started running, and I followed after him. Somewhere along the way I dropped my pillowcase, but I made it to the car, and almost to the passenger seat, before I fainted.

I woke up smelling something bitter and strong, and then I heard Jonathan talking, voice no longer muffled and distorted by the mask.

"Caroline!" he said sharply, and I opened my eyes, dizzy.

The car was where he had parked it, but one of the streetlights had gone out, and the bonfire had gone out too. (Perhaps they'd gone out together?) Jonathan was leaning over me, mask in one hand, small glass bottle in the other. I heard screams, and I smelled smoke in the air. My mask had disappeared somewhere.

"Oh, thank God," he said.

"What happened?" I asked, redundantly. I remembered _everything_, though through the haze of high spirits. "You gassed those kids, didn't you?"

He looked at me, eyes narrowing. I remembered all the bruises he'd had freshman year, him moving delicately, wincing when he brushed against a table or a chair. Last year the bruises had stopped appearing.

"Go ahead," he said simply. "Hit me. Hit me like they did." He looked at me, eyes half-closed, like he was waiting.

I stood up, shaking, bracing myself against the car. I met his gaze, but I said nothing.

"Hit me!" he screamed, and flecks of his spit landed on my face.

So I decked him.

He hissed, and I saw his teeth glinting in the light before he punched me.

"What did they do, Jonathan?" I asked. "What did they do? You said I could ask you questions."

I'd never dreamed I'd wind up in a fistfight with my best friend, but here I was, duking it out in the light of a dim and flickering streetlight. Something about it was probably symbolic, but I didn't have the time or the patience to figure out _what_ was symbolic or what it _meant_.

"Then I'll ask you questions, too," he said, serenely as if nothing was happening. "You're asking what they did. I tell you it doesn't really matter -- nothing does, really. And I ask you the more important question. Why?" He glanced upward at the sky. "Why did they feel the need to take their anger out on me? And why did they choose me, out of all the helpless kids they could have found?"

As pissed off as I was, I answered truthfully.

"I don't know," I said.

"Exactly." He seemed to be delighted by my response, even given that we'd been fighting a minute ago. "I told you I'd tell you what I've been doing. That's it. That's what I've been doing."

"That doesn't make any fucking sense," I said.

"Not to you," he said.

"Insanity usually doesn't make sense to anyone but the insane."

"Did it ever occur to you, Carrie, that the whole _world_ might be insane?" he asked. There was a strange sort of light in his eyes, an interior illumination of a kind I wasn't familiar with; the clear blue irises remained the same, but they seemed... glittery. Nervous. Paranoid.

"Consider it. Nothing makes sense. But we try to _force_ it to make sense. Then we're surprised when it doesn't work. And we take it out on whoever we can find to take it out on. Anyone -- anyone at all."

And I understood. I _understood_ his reasoning. I _understood_ what he was saying. He made sense. Just like always. Which was intensely frightening, considering the situation. "And that doesn't work, either," I said, and felt a little surprised that even given the situation, I was still acting like a _minion_. Damn it.

"Exactly." His eyes looked glittery and frozen in the light from the streetlamps. "I want to make them as afraid of me as I was of them." He leaned in close to me and whispered that line, and I realized that the short, dorky freshman whose company I'd fallen into had become a tall, still dorky, but downright _scary_ junior. "Quid pro quo, like you used to say." I _had_ introduced him to the concept. My one contribution.

And I must admit. Even from just _my_ encounters with the bunch of goons Jonathan was up against, I knew that they probably deserved whatever he had planned for them. Probably. I didn't know the full story -- and chances were, I never would. (I still don't, in fact.)

I crossed my arms. "If it's quid pro quo, shouldn't I get a crack at them, too?"

I saw him smile for a moment -- apparently, despite the attack of utter crazy, the Jonathan Crane I'd befriended, the one with a penchant for sarcasm and strong tea, was still in their somewhere. "Of course." And he _did_ smile. "Would you care to lend me a hand?"

"On one condition," I said, and he looked at me. Not the glare. Not staring through me. Just looking. I thought it was kind of nice. "You go see a fucking headshrink."

"Why?" he asked.

"Because you've been hilariously unsubtle tonight, and you're bound to get caught," I pointed out -- which was beginning, more and more, to seem like my _job_ in our relationship. He made the grand, sweeping statements, and I picked up on the little things. It worked. "Because you're still a juvenile, you can probably get away with a slap on the wrist."

"One problem, Carrie," he said softly. "I was wearing a mask, it was well after dark, and none of the people who got a glimpse of me saw my _face_. Even if they had, it was Halloween, and I was with you -- teenage boy, teenage girl, case closed."

I wanted to ask him if he _really_ thought I was nothing but an alibi, but I already knew the answer. I was his _friend_, and if I was also an alibi, well, that came in handy.

"All right," I said. "All right. Whatever, Jonathan."

And I realized that no matter what I did or said from then on, I was _always_ going to be his sidekick. There was nothing I could do about it.

And what the hell, I _liked_ it.

"One more thing," he said. "Call me Scarecrow."

"Deal." We shook hands and, bizarre as it seems, things returned to normal. More or less. It was always more or less with him.


	6. Best Friends Forever

"Dance, puppets, dance!"

I glanced over at Jonathan, who had been leaning over the edge of the catwalk and looking down at the people sitting in the house. "And you're _sure_ you're feeling better?"

"Oh, lots!" he said gaily, which was more than a little frightening, because the Jonathan Crane I knew was _never_ happy.

I'd paid one of the techies twenty bucks to let us up onto the catwalk and make sure that no one else was up there while we did our business. Now we were dressed as techies, waiting for the actual play to start.

It was a typical Crane plan: clever setup, but I'd probably balls up the actual execution. Although that was questionable, because I'd actually planned most of this one.

After a series of events which are too complicated to explain in one brief paragraph, Jonathan had been sent to a headshrink who'd put him on some drugs. Unlike him, I didn't know what they were or what they were for, but he seemed a lot less crazy after she'd put him on them, and things had largely calmed down around _hacienda_ Crane.

For Christmas, I'd bought him a novelty name plaque for his door that read "Scarecrow". (I figured things had finally gone belly-up when they found it in his room after he got fired and left town. He'd never deliberately have left it behind. And, what do you know? I was right about things going belly-up.) Things, in other words, were eerily close to high-school normal. Which worried me.

Anyway, like I said, he did the idea, I did the planning. I had come to the conclusion that I sucked at planning, and had decided that the planning, in future, should _probably_ be left up to Jonathan. As laughable as it sounded, I was the muscle, he was the brains.

Whoever was in charge of the music in prior to the show at our school had made a decidedly unwise choice tonight: Duran Duran playing softly over the speaker system, helpfully informing us that the singer was hungry like the wolf. And because of the way the speakers were mounted, we should have just rocked out, because _damn_ it was loud.

"So, uh, how long do we have to get out?" I asked.

Normally he would have shot me a death glare, but instead he followed his therapist's advice to use his words, not chemicals and/or violence. "It's heavier than air," he replied. "We both have masks, so technically we can hang around as long as we want."

"Yeah, but I only _paid_ that techie to let us up here to get our stuff set up," I pointed out, "and right now we're riding on pure luck, as far as getting caught up here. And if we get caught, we're screwed, because _you're_ the kid that firebombed a Halloween party."

This time he _did_ shoot me a death glare. "It wasn't firebombing," he said.

"We're _also_ screwed because anyone who comes up here is eventually going to figure that a, we have no idea what we're doing up here, and b, we're not actually techies."

He cut me off. "Anyone who'd be coming up here to check us out would get caught by the gas first. And if they happen to find two kids hiding in the catwalk, well, who's going to guess they had anything to do with that tragic gassing?"

"Sneaking up to the catwalk to have sex isn't exactly the logical thing to do when we're getting gassed," I pointed out. "And besides, neither of us is a good rhetorician, so how the hell do we convince them that that's what we were doing?"

"Rhetorician," he said thoughtfully. "Is that a real word, or did you just make it up?"

"Oh, yeah, it's a real word," I said.

"I'll have to start using it, then," he said. "How long until the show starts?"

I checked my watch. "We have twenty minutes."

He groaned. "I should have brought a Coke." He'd been a caffeine fiend since the sixth grade. And a devout Coke drinker.

"Headache?"

He nodded. Apparently either the meds or the shrink were helping him get over his fear of admitting weakness, which I'd never really noticed before he'd started getting over it. And apparently the shrink didn't know about his caffeine thing.

I flipped him my backup Advil bottle; he caught it, unscrewed the cap, and took two. Then he passed it back to me, looking down into the house, which was filling up with people, and checking his watch.

"Thanks," he said.

"No problem." It wasn't, really. He was the sole reason I carried Advil at all. "Boy Scout motto."

"Be prepared?"

"Work will make you free," I quipped.

He stared down into the house, studying the people filing in, taking seats, and chatting with each other. They were just people... to me, anyway.

The lights began to dim, and he swore under his breath before turning to me.

"Go time," I said.

He nodded.

I'd mounted the gas canisters to the light fixtures hanging from the catwalk, being careful to secure them with duct tape so that they'd mist out over the audience, not back into our faces. And of course I'd worn gloves, so my fingerprints were nowhere on the duct tape, the lights, or the actual canisters, which he'd prepared specifically for tonight. So, logically, they were disposable, which meant no sneaking back up here to get them back.

The lights dimmed all the way down, and after my eyes adjusted I could see the audience just as well as I had while the lights were on. Teenagers, mostly, which was why he'd picked this showing.

There was a spotlight on down below, highlighting the theatre director, who was on the stage, talking about the play. I wasn't listening to him; I didn't care about the play.

Once he'd finished, the spotlight followed him off the stage and then shut off. The audience clapped, and then fell silent.

I leaned over the edge in sync with Jonathan, and together we flipped the switches on the canisters, which sprayed a gentle mist into the air. The catwalk wasn't very far up, and so the stage was still dark when the gas hit the audience and the proverbial shit hit the fan. Exactly as planned.

I lingered for a moment -- well, I lingered for exactly thirty seconds, waiting for the panic to crescendo. Once it had, I stood up and fitted my mask over my face; Jonathan followed suit. Instead of the simple gas mask I was wearing, he was wearing the mask he'd worn on Halloween, presumably fitted with a gas mask inside.

The ladder wasn't far from our hiding place along the front edge of the catwalk, and I practically _flew_ down the ladder, only stopping briefly at the bottom to make sure that Jonathan wasn't going to miss a rung and fall.

Then I opened the door and stepped out.

No one else was backstage. Well, there were other people backstage, but they were also techies.

I made my exit quickly, through the door _next_ to the one that went up to the catwalk. This door was the one that led outside, and outside I went.

It was dark outside, a chilly December night. There was no snow on the ground. Not here.

I wasn't wearing a jacket, though, so I made my escape to the car a quick one, sprinting to it, opening the door, and jumping inside. Jonathan was one step behind me.

Once he was in the car, I turned it on and cranked the heat up to full before whipping off my mask and running a hand through my hair. I was sweaty and gross, and I wanted very little more than a shower and a cup of coffee.

Jonathan tossed something at me -- it was a bad habit of his. I picked it up and looked at it -- it looked like a... _hemp bracelet_?

"I made you a friendship bracelet," he muttered, staring out into the parking lot. "My therapist made me."

"Sounds more like a hateship bracelet," I said, mostly out of the compulsion to respond to his comment, not out of any urge to snark at him. I was tired. I didn't have the energy to _really_ snark back.

I dropped him off at his apartment and went back home. I fell asleep pretty much immediately after I got into bed, and if I dreamed, didn't remember it.

The next morning, as usually, I spotted him standing by his locker in the hallway, lost in thought. I'd put on the bracelet that morning, absentmindedly.

"Hey!" I said, waving to get his attention. "Hey, Jonathan!"

That did it. He looked at me, and I made a heart on my chest with my fingers.

"Best friends forever!" I called in my best sing-song Cheerleader Voice, and, predictable as always, he scowled at me, then slammed the locker door and stalked off.

I loved getting an opportunity to get at him like that. God knew he was good at driving _me_ nuts.

Little did I know.


End file.
